Understanding General Anesthesia

You’re scheduled to have your impacted wisdom tooth pulled out in a few days, and you’re not at all excited about it. Who can blame you? Wisdom tooth extraction can be pretty uncomfortable. Despite the severe fright that surrounds you, you know very well that avoiding your procedure can only add up to your problems. Therefore, you decide to just put up with all of the discomfort that your procedure brings. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. In fact, you can undergo an anxiety and pain-free wisdom tooth extraction with the help of general anesthesia.

To educate you better about general anesthesia, we have outlined a few details on it below:

General anesthesia defined
General anesthesia is a dental sedation method that entails you to receive the sedative drugs intravenously through a needle that is placed on your arms or hands. As soon as these sedative drugs make their way into your veins, you won’t feel any pain and will fall completely asleep.

Procedure involved in administering general anesthesia
The first step in general anesthesia is a consultation between you and your dentist wherein he discusses the risks and benefits of your procedure, specifies some medications and pre-operative instructions, and asks you to sign a consent form. On your big day, your dentist checks on you for one last time to determine if you’re healthy enough to continue with your procedure. If your dentist doesn’t see anything wrong with you, he proceeds to placing monitoring equipment on your body. After preparing the monitoring equipment, your dentist performs nitrous oxide sedation on you to eliminate any anxiety that you may feel while receiving the needle. Once the sedative gas takes effect, your dentist injects your arms or hands with the needle before removing it and leaving the tube that holds it to infuse the sedatives into your veins. He then monitors you carefully to see if you’re calm enough to undergo the regular dental procedure.

Gain a much deeper understanding of general anesthesia by visiting our Carmel, Indiana dental office. You may also call 317-451-4050 to schedule an appointment with our Really Smile team.